5 Healthy Ways to Deal with Negative Thinking - Nick Wignall

If you understand what types of situations or events are most likely to trigger negative thinking, you can avoid a lot of negative thinking before it even happens.

Identify the triggers for negative thinking, deal with those triggers more directly, and you won’t experience nearly as much negative thinking in the first place.

Most people are in the habit of only thinking about their negative thinking when it shows up.

The best time to do hard, important work is when you’re feeling good, not when your life is falling apart!

And this principle applies to negative thinking as well.

Instead, you need to practice and prepare for it. And that means taking some time to intentionally confront your negative thinking head-on so that you can get to know it and make a real plan for navigating it at the moment.

Cognitive distortions are errors in thinking that lead to unnecessarily painful and prolonged emotions.

We all fall into cognitive distortions from time to time. And while you probably can’t avoid them altogether, you can get much better at noticing them.

Anytime you feel your mood dropping or some difficult emotion intensifying, ask yourself:

What was I thinking just now? What thoughts led to this shift in emotion or mood?

Write down that self-talk on paper and look for any cognitive distortions. Once you find some, calmly and nonjudgmentally identify which they are 

The content of your thoughts determines the content of your moods:

• If you’re constantly worrying, you’re going to feel pretty anxious.
• If you’re chronically ruminating on how someone hurt you, you’re going to feel pretty angry.

Negative thinking can lead to painful emotions, but painful emotions can also be a trigger for negative thinking (and more painful emotion!)

So it’s worth identifying which emotions or moods tend to make you more susceptible to unhelpful negative thinking patterns.